Daddy Do-Funny's Wisdom Jingles

NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1916
Copyright, 1910, 1911, 1912, 1913, by The Century Co. Published, October, 1913



To the Memory of those faithful brown slave-men of the plantations throughout the South, Daddy's contemporaries all, who during the war while their masters were away fighting in a cause opposed to their emancipation, brought their blankets and slept outside their mistresses' doors, thus keeping night-watch over otherwise unprotected women and children—a faithful guardianship of which the annals of those troublous times record no instance of betrayal.


In presenting a loyal and venerable ex-slave as an artless exponent of freedom, freedom of conduct as well as of speech, the author of this trivial volume is perhaps not composing an individual so truly as individualizing a composite, if the expression will pass.
The grizzled brown dispenser of homely admonitions is a figure not unfamiliar to those who have moved in plantation circles in the cotton and sugar country, and touched hands with the kindly dark survivors of the old regime.
If the man, Daddy Do-funny, was unique as an individual, perhaps in the very fact of an individuality unembarrassed by the limitations of convention, of education and of precedent, he becomes in a sense typical of his people and of his time.
Of course, a man is not called Do-funny for nothing, not even playfully and in the free vernacular of rusticity at its freest.